|
Thinking About Making an Offer
By Joseph M. Kaiser |
|
|
Thinking about making an offer? Not so fast there, big guy. Today, you need to do one thing before doing anything else (and that includes writing up that offer): protect yourself from risk of loss. Maybe it has always been that way, or should have been, anyway, but I never really worried about it too much. I figured people would treat me fairly more often than not, and those were odds I could like with. Times have changed, I’ve discovered. It used to be just an occasional lawyer nipping at my heals, but now it’s everyone, sellers, tenants, lenders, now everyone seems to be ready to snatch whatever they can from my picnic basket, and I’m growing more than a little tired of it. I’m here to tell you that a game plan just isn’t good enough anymore. Not nearly. Looking back on 2001, I realize I did several deals that lost money. Now, I did dozens of deals and made money on most, heck nearly all them, but when I think back about this year and the deals I closed, the first thing that pops in my mind are those deals where I came out on the losing end. That bugs the heck out of me and as a result, I decided to do something about it and spent a couple months thinking about nothing but fine-tuning my operation adding some additional safeguards into my investment strategies. The result is the course. When I finally sat down and actually took a long hard look, I was shocked. I had made some truly bone-headed decisions, things that are so obvious today but things I simply overlooked or didn't think warranted my consideration. I was dead wrong. In one instance, I'd let someone else close a property for me, figuring they knew what they were doing. It was an out of state deal and I didn’t feel like getting on an airplane to attend a closing. |
Boy, would I like to have that day to live over. That one mistake would of pay a year's worth of tuition for one of my kids. I bought a house because the person living in it, a tenant, agreed to buy it from us later on. He even agreed to pay us a premium price for the privilege. When I finally evicted the idiot tenant soon thereafter, I was stuck with a property that was over encumbered and under cared for. I dumped that property, but only after spending thousands of dollars and months and months of labor, and I didn't come close to breaking even. On another deal, I'd made a loan to someone to open his own restaurant. As it turned out, he had no business running a restaurant and more importantly, I had no business loaning him the money so he could find out. I work foreclosures, do subject to deals, lease options, and just about anything else that seems like it would make a good fit. That means there's a lot of things we need to be aware of, to think about, to pay attention to. In this business, a lot of things have to happen before you can get paid. And with every one of those things, your new deal can come crashing to a ground if your not careful. In this course, we're going to take a look at all of those things. I'm going to show you exactly what went wrong on many of my past deals and what I do differently today in order to make sure it doesn't happen again. We are going to look at every aspect of any particular deal and were going to make sure that our game plan doesn't have any weak spots. We're going to make our particular game plan "solid." Now, when you decide to make your next offer our, you will do so fully armed. And the odds of that deal working out the way you intend will be in your favor. |
